Grooming is the first thing you do with your horse after catching them. The quality of grooming time can set the tone for all that’s to follow so it’s import...

Recently I found myself saying to a student, ‘it’s a conversation, not a command’. This one phrase is probably the most important thing I can teach. When the...

Training is the action of teaching a person or animal a particular skill or type of behaviour, according to Google. The main word in this sentence is teachin...

One thing many people have difficulty with is horses sticking their heads up when under saddle. This is undesirable for a number of reasons; it doesn’t look ...

Asking a horse to drop their head with a soft and immediate response is one of the best things you will ever train into your horse. When a horse is stressed ...

In the horse world, there are two main types of people, horse riders and horse trainers. While trainers are an excellent option for starting young horses, th...

Recently a student pointed out that my work is defined by how I listen to horses. The traditional way of interacting with horses is to tell them what to do, ...

Many people use positive reinforcement with horses, instead of or as well as other forms of training (negative reinforcement, habituation, desensitisation, s...

When a young horse misbehaves, the lead mare may send them out of the herd, running them in circles until they give signals saying they accept the rules of t...

For quite a while I have been trying to work out exactly what it is that I do with horses. I have called it Natural Horsemanship, and in the past I have stud...

Here’s a good question to ask. When I am with my horse am I making it easy for my horse to succeed or difficult? Sometimes I see people making things difficu...

So what is desensitisation? Well the opposite of sensitisation! And that’s the tricky bit, you must be very clear of what you’re doing as you might accidenta...

Whenever your horse does something that you've asked for it's imperative that you give a reward. This reward lets the horse know that they gave the correct r...

When I meet a new horse we often go through what I call ‘the conversation’. This is where we check each other out and decide how we’re going to progress from...

This is a great game to play with any horse that has a rusty ‘go button’. It develops forwardness in the horse, gets snappy responses to leg aids, builds hor...

TRAINING/DETRAINING Everything we do with our horses is training them or de-training them. We call it training when the horse ends up doing something ‘better...

This heading sounds a bit like a topic for a conference, not the horse paddock. But it’s a very important subject to be aware of when working with horses. A ...

Here is a great little exercise that will improve your feel for your horse and your riding skills, make your horse suppler, and increase safety when riding. ...

The use of food in training horses is a controversial topic. Many ‘horse people’ are against using food treats. With all other species of animal food is used...

Everyone’s looking for the happy place. This is where life is beautiful, there are no pressures on us and no stress, this is where we can relax and enjoy wha...